y. We have told, too, of Jay Gould's ideas
of railroad management, which seem to have been to get the most out of
it for Jay Gould. But when Jay Gould died, he was caught, as it were,
with thousands of miles of railroads on his hands. He left four sons,
George Gould, Edwin Gould, Howard Gould and Frank Gould, of whom George
is the only one that really counts. But he, with a real genius for
railroad building, has developed the Gould lines into a great system
stretching from Buffalo and Pittsburgh southwestward to Chicago, Omaha,
Kansas City, Denver, Ogden, St. Louis, New Orleans, Galveston and away
out to El Paso. These lines have played a most important part in the
development of the great Southwest, and it is said that George Gould is
already blazing a way to the Atlantic seaboard, as an outlet for the
mighty freight traffic which his lines control.

No man connected with railroad building in this country has had a more
interesting or adventurous career than James J. Hill. Born on a little
Canadian farm in 1838, descended from the hardy Scotch-Irish of whom we
have spoken so often, his father died when he was fifteen years, and he
was left to his own resources. He found work as a wood-chopper, and one
day, while he was chopping down a tree a traveler stopped at the house
to take dinner, hitching his horse to the gate. The boy noticed that it
was tired and fagged and carried it a bucket of water. This attention
pleased the traveler, and as he drove away, tossed the boy a Minnesota
newspaper, remarking, "Go out there, young man. That country needs
youngsters of your spirit."

The boy read the paper with its glowing accounts of the new country, and
the next morning, walking to the tree he had been cutting he hit it one
last lick for luck, and announced, "I've chopped my last tree." That
tree, it is said, bears to-day a great placard with the words, "The last
tree chopped by James J. Hill." It _was_ the last one, for a day or two
later the boy started for St. Paul. He brought with him to the United
States the lusty body, frugal instincts and good principles of his
Scotch-Irish ancestry, and, in addition to those, a self-confidence and
sureness of judgment destined to take him far.

He got employment as a shipping clerk in a steamboat office in St. Paul,
and so took his first lessons in transportation problems. Pretty soon he
was agent for a steamboat line, then he established a fuel and
transportation business on his own